[ARCHIVED] Interpreting timestamp on quiz

[brettjones]

I'm trying to find out what time a student started and submitted a quiz. I live in EST.

Question 1: When I get to the "Session Information" page for this student's quiz it says "Started at Wed Sep 04 2019 22:29:22 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)". Am I correct that this student started the quiz at 18:29:22 EST (which is 22:29:22 minus 0400, which is 6:29 pm)?

Question 2: She completed the quiz in 21:36 minutes, so the submitted time should be 22:29:22 + 0:21:36, which should be 22:50:58 UTC. Yet, when I download the Excel file for the quiz, in the "submitted" column for this student it reads "2019-09-05 2:52:53 UTC". What's going on here? Isn't GMT the same as UTC? What time was this quiz submitted? On the right side of the Canvas page it says it was submitted on "Sept 4 at 10:52 PM." I'm confused as to why all these times don't align.

[kimberly_smith1]

Perhaps this will help? 

I apply "Eastern Time (US & Canada) (-05:00/-04:00)" in my course Settings. When looking at a student's recently submitted quiz, I get: 

• Quiz Results page = Submitted Aug 27 at 2:21pm, This attempt took 30 minutes.
• View Log page = Started at Thu Aug 27 2020 13:51:36 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)
• Statistics > Student Analysis Report = 2020-08-27 18:21:36 UTC

The quiz was submitted at 2:21pm EST (a.k.a. 14:21), and the attempt took 30 minutes. In EST, that translates to 1:51pm EST (a.k.a. 13:51). So, that "GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)" is just another way of reflecting current EST (GMT minus 4 hours). As for UTC... that is a bit trickier (and I just ignore those in my CSV files), but here is a link the might help? https://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/